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Saturday, April 3, 2010

For last Sunday's Week-in-Review segment, the Times put together this photo-mashup lumping the 1960s-era Weather Underground terrorists with a shot of elderly citizen-patriots protesting ObamaCare on Capitol Hill last Sunday.

The caption reads, "VARYING DEGREES OF RAGE: The Weathermen, including Bill Ayers, second from right, during the Days of Rage in 1969, and anti-health reform protesters in Washington on Sunday."

No doubt the editors included that "varying degrees" qualifier will get them off the hook. But there's no escaping the truly bankrupt moral equivalence NYT's claiming between a genuine domestic terrorist organization and a grassroots movement of conservatives, middle-class anti-tax activists, and an army of frustrated geriatrics. In contrast to a year's worth of tea parties and town halls, the Moscow-backed Weatherman launched a series of bombings starting in 1969, totalling 25 attacks in all, as part of its war against "Amerikkka." To this day, unrepentant terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn are venerated as social justice messiahs while today's citizen tea party activists wind up on DHS intelligence reports as "right wing extremists."

Anyway, the Times' article is "When Does Political Anger Turn to Violence?" And this meme will be repeated again and again until election day, all part of the smear manufacturing industry that's propping up Democratic fearmongers. And note this beauty of a passage below, where the murderous rampage of domestic jihadi U.S. Army Maj. Malik Nadal Hasan is chalked up to the ravings of a "lone fanatic." No doubt Anwa al-Awlaki's rolling on the floor somewhere at some militant recruiting center in Yemen:

Most experts agree that such rhetoric probably raises the remote risk of lone-wolf violence — acts of individual terrorism like the shooting at Fort Hood last November, or the attack last month in Austin, Tex., in which a man flew his plane into the building housing an Internal Revenue Service office, killing himself and an office worker.

Such acts are far too rare to be studied in any rigorous way. When they do occur, however, often there is evidence that the perpetrator was playing to a larger audience perceived to be sympathetic, whether radical Muslims, antitax crusaders or, in the case of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, citizens angry about government intrusions.

UPDATE: Linked at Gateway Pundit! Thanks.Also, this post has been edited for accuracy.